by Laurence | Apr 26, 2007 | Social search
Defining Web 2.0 remains something of a parlor game for bloggers. I was amused this morning to see a three-point summary that’s tongue-in-cheek — except not. Here’s point #3:
Unclear business model, pastel colors & large fonts used
Actually, most of the current Web 2.0 definitions seem overly complicated to me. Getting into specific delivery mechanisms, or specific software philosophies, seems unnecessary.
If its primary value to a user depends on the participation of other users, it’s Web 2.0.
by Laurence | Apr 26, 2007 | Competitors
While earlier Web 2.0-ish local sites have been dealing with shifting sands, new sites continue to appear. YellowBot is among the latter, and appears to be hanging its hat on tags.
What’s to like about YellowBot? Here are a few things:
- Tags are generally a good idea
- YellowBot has bought nationwide base data from Localeze, which means I don’t have to wait for users to build the site
- It has pre-seeded the tags
- Its location input box has a “suggest” feature that finds matching street addresses in real time, which I haven’t seen before
What’s not to like?
- The pre-seeded tags are a bit hinky, which makes them less useful. In fact, the site’s data seems shaky overall. More on this below.
- Despite the somewhat cool street-address feature, the location “suggestions” work rather weirdly. (Try typing in an address.)
- The site has virtually no user content, even in places where I’d imagine it should, such as its hometown of LA. It has imported some reviews from CitySearch, Zagat and possibly elsewhere, but this seems inconsistent.
- The editorial tone of the site is exclusionary, or possibly just dumb.
The tone is a problem because it’s grating and counterproductive. Maybe I’m getting too old, but I refuse on principle to rate anything as either “rank” (1 star) or “off the heezy” (5 stars):
This tone is echoed in the FAQ:
Tags are the flava … of YellowBot.
Mmmm-hmmm.
Is it possible that some people think this is cool? I suppose so, but I can’t imagine YellowBot will get lots of reviews of lawyers and lawn-care services (both of which it touts on its home page today) from such an audience.
Other things will be harder to change. There’s the whole chicken/egg problem of sparse user content; I’ll post soon about that general issue.
And then there’s the data, especially as reflected by tags. I suspect that YellowBot bought its pre-seeded tag content, and the UI really plays it up. Some of it is useful, the rest … not so much.
As a minor example, my brother John runs a hot-dog joint on Hollywood Boulevard in LA. Skooby’s is famous for its hot dogs. YellowBot’s tags for the place, none of which appear to have been contributed by users, are as follows:
Bar Food – Burgers – dining – food – Pizza – restaurant
OK, I forgive the absence of “hot dogs.” But “burgers” and “pizza” are actively wrong. John serves burgers in his quasi-nearby Hermosa Beach location, but YellowBot doesn’t have that listing at all. He doesn’t serve pizza anywhere. If I search for “pizza” and get directed to Skooby’s, I’m being misled.
(I’ll find lasting consolation in LA’s best hot dog, fries and lemonade, of course.)
Some of the YellowBot tags appear to have been entered from Yellow Pages ads. Others are just a mystery. Here’s one medical place in Leesburg, VA:
And another:
It’s not just tags. The number-two result for a search on “doctor” in Leesburg, VA, is listed as follows:
Jackson River Orthopedics PC
I-64 Exit 21
Leesburg, VA
This business isn’t in Leesburg. I-64 goes nowhere near here.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have to look very hard for examples like this. I’m hoping that YellowBot will work out these kinks before long.
by Laurence | Apr 20, 2007 | Being a startup
So far Loladex is a bootstrap operation. I haven’t asked anyone for money, but I’ve spent some time looking at the world of funding. There are many sources of advice on such matters, and they all seem to agree on one cliche:
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
I’m sure every Web entrepreneur has heard this. It’s depressing to have your inspiration called a commodity, but I do understand: A half-baked idea that gets prompt and competent execution is a much better bet than a long-delayed and sloppily executed plan of surpassing genius.
Since VCs are in the betting business, they’re certainly justified in relegating ideas to third place. (First and second are industry sector and team, not necessarily in that order.)
But let me speak here as a Web user: Good ideas are not a dime a dozen, dammit.
OK, I’m sure I’d make a lousy VC. Still, if I suddenly landed on the other side of the table I’d be looking for teams of great executors, sure — but only those teams who bring a decent idea to said table.
To me this would be a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
A great team that’s busily executing on an incomplete idea, or a me-too effort, or blatant acquisition bait, or something downright stupid … well, it’s just depressing.
Life is too short, even if there’s money to be made.
This is a unique time. “Web 2.0,” or whatever you want to call it, is manifestly what the Internet was made for. There are lots of people out there right now with truly great ideas that deserve support.
But there are also lots of mediocre and bad ideas, and we hurt the greater community when we don’t make distinctions. IMO, the investing community should take an active pride in the quality of the ideas it supports. A good VC will advance the Web, not just his interests, with each funding decision.
For an entrepreneur, ideas are the opposite of a commodity: Your belief in the idea is so strong that you can’t do anything else. When the time comes for Loladex to seek money, I hope to find VCs who feel the same way.
by Laurence | Apr 17, 2007 | Local search, Social search
Lately there’s been some attention focused on the pros and cons of rate-and-review sites such as Yelp, which is making headway in restaurant reviews, and TripAdvisor, which long ago reached critical mass in hotel reviews.
(Sample coverage: Search Engine Land, Greg Sterling, the New York Times.)
I find user ratings and reviews to be helpful, but they’re never as helpful as I’d like. Some of my beefs:
- Ratings and reviews require way too much work to analyze.
- Review coverage is almost always spotty. (TripAdvisor is an exception; it has extraordinary coverage.)
- Reviews seldom speak to my personal concerns.
I’m happiest when I don’t need to read any reviews at all: If one pizza place has 893 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5, for instance, and another has 514 reviews with an average rating of just 1.1 stars — well, I know where I’m going.
More often, however, one place has 7 reviews with an average rating of 3.1 stars, while another has 4 reviews with an average rating of 3.4 stars. Then I know that I’m doomed to a lot of reading, and that I won’t necessarily emerge with a conclusion.
Also, I rarely have any familiarity with the reviewers on (say) Yelp, even if they’re reviewing restaurants in my hometown. Do they have kids, for instance? Sure, I can hope they mention it in their reviews, or I can look at people’s profiles to see if they are somehow “like me.”
But really, do I have to work so hard?
I think my issues are pretty common. IMO they’re indicative of a larger disconnect: Despite their portrayal as such, rate-and-review sites just aren’t good tools for answering a question like “Where should I go for pizza in Leesburg?”
Rate-and-review is more of a due-diligence tool, better suited to answer a question like “What’s the scoop on Fireworks Pizza?” (Alas, no link to Yelp here; it has no reviews yet.) Such questions don’t necessarily feed into a recommendation. Indeed, they’ll often follow one.
This is the difference, I think, between social search and social research.
Of course, for some decisions — an anniversary dinner, a trip to Puerto Rico — I’m perfectly willing to spend time on due diligence, just as I’ll go to CNET when I’m researching a printer.
But mostly I just want a quick, trustworthy recommendation. And for that, I need a different type of tool. It could be editorial, a professional voice I trust and is, as luck would have it, omnipresent and omniscient.
Or it could be social, a quick way to tap into personally relevant opinions and information.
by Laurence | Apr 17, 2007 | Loladex
Actually, I haven’t decided for sure whether the site itself will be called Loladex. But the company name has a few origins:
- It evokes “rolodex,” which has been an important metaphor for me.
- It continues a tradition. My wife’s bakery is Lola Cookies & Treats.
- It evokes “local.” (Well, not really. But kind of.)
Not everyone likes the name, but I’m getting very attached to it.
by Laurence | Apr 16, 2007 | Competitors, Local search
Now don’t get me wrong: Maps are an important element of local search. What’s more, Google Maps was a force for good when it launched, and possibly still is.
But when it merged its mapping and local products, Google cemented a meme that’s been pushing local search into too narrow a channel, both for Google itself and for the competitors it influences.
The meme, in short: Local = map.
Or worse, local = big honking map.
Here’s a (shrunken) screengrab from Google Maps for my classic sample query, [ Pizza ] near [ Leesburg, VA ]:
Presumably Google thinks the map is the most important thing on this page. On my screen it takes up ~75% of the space, and it expands along with my browser window.
By contrast, the results column on the left — the actual most important thing on the page — is constrained to 300 pixels. Even if I make my window bigger, it won’t get any larger.
Now compare the information that’s available from each of these two elements — the immediate payoff. The results column is information-rich, and is meaningful as a standalone element. That’s a high payoff. But the map is meaningless without either (a) looking at the left column; or (b) clicking on one of the stick pins.
Furthermore, the map can’t simultaneously display all of the information that’s being shown in the results column. I’d need to click the map ten times to expose it all — if the stick pins were all clickable, that is, and not stacked on top of each other.
And of course, a map might not even be relevant to my results. When I search for “pizza,” I may be interested in the exact location of each matching business. But when I search for “plumber,” or even “pizza delivery,” I’m probably not — what matters is service area, which is only roughly related.
In other words, Google’s map may seem like a strong visual summary, because that’s how we usually think of maps, but it’s actually very ineffective. It looks nice, to be sure, but it’s a terrible waste of space.
Black it out, and what have you lost?
Very little, I’d argue. The same can’t be said about the results column:
This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a map on the page, of course. I don’t even object to the size of the map, per se. The problem is that Google has left only 300 pixels in which to do everything else — which, as a practical matter, means it can’t do much.
Take Google’s new “My Maps” functionality, which launched the other day. It’s kinda interesting and philosophically in sync with Loladex. But of necessity it’s hidden behind a tab in the left column, where I can’t imagine it’ll have a chance to flourish.
That’s a real shame (except maybe for Loladex).
Indeed, Google can’t fit much except names and addresses in 300 pixels, which seriously limits the evolution of its product.
It can innovate within the map, I suppose, but IMO a map simply isn’t a good vehicle for displaying a result set in which the content of individual results is neither uniform nor already known by the user.
Supplementing or illustrating such a result set, yes — but not displaying it.
Not all of Google’s competitors are quite so constrained by their own maps, but it’s just a matter of degree. Google has framed the debate, as it so often does, and now any product without a huge map on the results page seems somehow … suspect.
Needless to say, Loladex won’t have a results page that’s overwhelmed by a map. Maps will enrich our site, but they won’t determine its shape.
by Laurence | Apr 13, 2007 | Local search, Social search
Here are some “typical” local searches — queries that people might type into an online Yellow Pages product or its equivalent:
- [ Pizza ] near [ Leesburg, VA ]
- [ Appliance repair ] near [ Grand Rapids, MI ]
- [ Lawnmower sales ] near [ Portland, OR ]
These queries are “search-engine speak”; people have been trained to formulate their desires in a particular shorthand, to maximize the chances of finding what they seek.
But do these formulations truly reflect what we’re looking for?
Nope: Unless someone is seeking information on a specific business, their query usually has an unspoken qualifier. For instance, I don’t just want pizza in Leesburg, VA — I want the best pizza in Leesburg, VA.
(“Best” is a frequent unspoken qualifier, but by no means the only one. Other likely suspects include cheap, trustworthy, prompt, authorized, etc. In an ideal world, I would add “used by my friends,” “owned by a neighbor,” and more.)
In order to become an important resource in people’s lives, a local search product must tackle these unspoken qualifiers — must make them central to its mission, in fact.
Without focusing on the unspoken qualifiers, which are mainly social-type information, the best a local search product can hope to be is “a better Yellow Pages.” And that’s not much of a rallying cry, IMO: Maps, attributes, blah, blah, blah.
This isn’t an original insight, I know. It was behind the recent burst of “Local 2.0” rate-and-review products — sites such as Insider Pages, Yelp and Judy’s Book — and, before them, the more scalable aspects of what I’d call Local 1.0: Places like CitySearch and my alma mater, AOL’s Digital City.
Still, the insight has yet to be fully acted on:
- Rate-and-review looks (to me, anyways) to be reaching the limits of its usefulness. It’s not the solution — or at least, not the whole solution. I’ll post more about rate-and-review soon.
- The search portals seem very ambivalent about pushing the social aspects of local search. They are heavily constrained by their devotion to a map-based interface, which won’t allow them put social information front-and-center.
Loladex intends to fill the gap.
by Laurence | Apr 12, 2007 | Local search, Loladex
I’ll get into more detail as the weeks progress, but basically Loladex is a new site that will help users find businesses and people in the real world. It’s based on the premise that today’s so-called “local search” products — products like Google Maps, for instance — don’t work very well, particularly when it comes to finding local businesses:
- They have little in common with the way I look for local businesses “in real life”
- And they’re not truly helpful in finding local businesses, unless I already have a specific one in mind
The first point wouldn’t be much of a sin, except that (IMO) it causes the second.
So how do I find, say, a plumber in real life? Well, if I want to find a good plumber, I ask someone. That’s where I figure we’ll start.
An aside:
After working on local Web sites for many years, I find myself using the industry’s stock examples. For whatever reason, plumbers come up a lot. I think it’s from the old days of print Yellow Pages.
And yet … I’m always surprised by how bad the Web is at finding a good plumber. (Any old plumber? Sure, the Web can handle that.)
So many industry experts use “plumber” as an example that you’d imagine this problem would have been licked — or even just addressed — ages ago. If I have my way, Loladex will be the first local search product that actually does well on this poster-boy of search terms.
